iWith.org: Web development for the non-profit world *

iWith.org at CosmoBolitan BarCamp, Barcelona, 2010

Cucurulla's hub of NGO supporters and new technologies enthusiasts, iWith.org Barcelona, hosted on July 23rd and 24th , 2010, the CosmoBolitan Barcamp, a 2 days un-conference that brought together in the same virtual space dozens of speakers and participants from Argentina, Bolivia, United States, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Spain, Italy, France, Romania y Switzerland.

It was the perfect opportunity for Internet users, explorers or developers to get together and discuss about their online experience, share their know-how and ideas and connect their common visions to eventually help make the world a better place with the use of technologies.
From national issues as elections and local development, to innovative technology and interactive web and video platform, all the way to tackling media & blogging related aspects, sociological phenomena as migration, corporate initiatives as CSR or successful business and social entrepreneurship, a wide range of subjects had their 15 minutes of ON AIR performance and interactivity under the coordination of Pablo Sánchez Kohn, the Bolivianosglobales.com founder and organizer of the current BarCamp event.

Although each one of the interventions deserves a significant part of comments and appreciations – which I will invite you to offer by taking a tour of the event here: http://pio.la/platforms/piola/event/cosmobolitan-barcamp – I will only share a bit more on the host's contribution.

Iwith.org was proud to count among its representatives the President and Founder, Jordi Duran i Batidor whose inspiring entrepreneurship experience shed a new light on the perspective of success and failure of a project. What is success? A simple service initiative, aimed at improving the world through the use of new technologies. 300 organizations worldwide are assisted by this service and their work can now make a difference. A non-profit model that will never make its founder richer but will certainly enrich people's lives. What is failure? An innovative project based on artificial intelligence and Internet technologies aimed at analyzing user behavior, years before semantic web appeared as a necessity. It was closed a few years after its launch due to lack of resources and investors trust to resurrect years after in a small networking idea that a young American student had for his group of friends, Facebook.com. Success or failure, it is all about the perspective!

The organization's Resources Manager, Ramon Bartomeus, offered its insights on the possibility of creating 300 events in one week. Sounds like an impossible challenge? It was the dream of a Catalan entrepreneur that managed with the use of the tools provided by Ab.core – the integrated platform iWith.org develops – to organize Semana de la Biodiversidad, a 300 different manifestations initiative that was created and successfully communicated online.

In the context of the rising power of the Action in network, Liviana Mustafa, Partnership Manager of iWith.org in Switzerland and Pablo Sanchez Kohn discussed in parallel their experience in developing online social networks for migrants, Romanians (www.strada32.com) and Bolivians (www.bolivianosglobales.com), respectively. The good, the bad and the ugly of these specific communities, the Do's and Dont's and the particular relation between national identity and technology – these are just some of the aspects that were tackled in the presentations.

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* We are helping the third and fourth sector –NGOs, associations, social entrepreneurs and socially responsible companies– to make the most of the opportunities that the Internet offers in creating a world we would like to live in. Powered by iWith.org